Friday, March 14, 2014

A Purim Post: The Waze Conundrum

On a very serious note, Israel's Ministry of Religion has contracted the popular GPS application WAZE to create a special service for WAZE users in Israel -- the ability to find mikvaot in every Israeli city.

Ostensibly, this is a great idea - demonstrating how the religious establishment connects to the community by offering a well-intentioned high-tech solution for discretely finding the closest mikva to your location.

Here in Israel, Waze isn't only used as a GPS program, but its connected directly to people's Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter feeds -- enabling your friends to see where you are going, and where you have "checked in.". WAZE actually posts your location to your FaceBook page...and you are bound to even forget its being posted there.

Unfortunately, the following disaster scenarios are a very likely possibility...

And of course, this would propagate via the web on twitter and all the standard social media applications.